The climatic importance of the microphysical and radiative properties of clouds, particularly cloud droplet effective radii (re), optical depths (τ), and albedos are widely recognized. For reliable application of satellite datasets in cloud process and single column models, it is important to have a reasonable estimate of the errors in the derived cloud properties. When properly used, ground-ba...

Fluctuations in the ambient environment can trigger chromatin disruptions, involving replacement of nucleosomes or exchange of their histone subunits. Unlike canonical histones, which are available only during S-phase, replication-independent histone variants are present throughout the cell cycle and are adapted for chromatin repair. The H2A.Z variant mediates responses to environmental perturb...

Reef corals harbouring clade D Symbiodinium spp. (endosymbiotic dinoflagellates) appear more tolerant of environmental stress. As sea surface temperatures rise, symbioses involving Symbiodinium D may increase in prevalence. For this reason, eight polymorphic microsatellite loci were developed for clade D Symbiodinium. From the analysis of 132 samples originating from cnidarian hosts in the Atla...

This paper is concerned with the connection between two classes of population variables: measures of population growth rate--the Malthusian parameter, the net reproduction rate, the gross reproduction rate, and the mean life expectancy; and measures of demographic heterogeneity--population entropy. It is shown that the entropy functions predict the response of the growth rate parameters to pert...

The use of ribosomal RNA (rRNA) as molecular marker to identify microbial populations is now routinely used in microbial ecology. One of the strategies herein is cloning of PCR products obtained from environmental DNA to explore the diversity of microbial communities without the need of cultivation. Although successful, this approach is for practical reasons not suited to study the complex dyna...

Biological systematics studies suggest that species are discretized in niche space. That is, rather than seeing a continuum of organism types with respect to continuous environmental variations, observers instead find discrete species or clumps of species, with one clump separated from another in niche space by a gap. Here, using a simple one dimensional model with a smoothly varying environmen...

Mountain regions are characterized by sensitive ecosystems, enhanced occurrences of extreme weather events and natural catastrophes; they are also regions of conflicting interests between economic development and environmental conservation. Once regarded as hostile and economically nonviable regions, mountains have in the latter part of the twentieth century attracted major economic investments...

Prenatal exposure of the developing brain to various types of environmental stress increases susceptibility to neuropsychiatric disorders such as autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and schizophrenia. Given that even subtle perturbations by prenatal environmental stress in the cerebral cortex impair the cognitive and memory functions, this review focuses on underlying molecular mec...

Despite the huge interest in network resilience to stress, most of the studies have concentrated on internal stress damaging network structure (e.g., node removals). Here we study how networks respond to environmental stress deteriorating their external conditions. We show that regular networks gradually disintegrate as environmental stress increases but disordered networks suddenly collapse at...